An Arquebus That Was Used at Waterloo

Maybe I'm just really a conservative in everything and resistant to all change, but I think this all looks wretched with the new font, which normally doesn't to me seem tremendously different from Times (although I admit to being one of the seven people in the world that reads the little page in every book about fonts and typeset and the lonely man who does it).

It does seem a great deal easier to read, though (check out the now-totally-garish but still-as-sad-as-ever Counter below! yipes! it makes my failure at fame the much more obvious; all the more it could do would be to blink the sad stats in a glitter-ridden pink!), and as I was just telling the mother, some time in the next five or ten years I'm going to consider applying for corrective eyewear (ooh, wait, convene strategists and deliberate: not if Sarah Palin is just beginning her second term as President; although waitwait, I should by then have adapted to a different updo or shaved These Ebon Locks (As glossy as a heron's wing/Upon the turban of a king) (which o'erspread my youthful neck/ my cheeks a bashful red) altogether, and everyone will be as appalled with her as they are of any second-term incumbent, even if they voted for him/her twice, so no connection will necessarily be made between my deteriorating eyesight and the former governor of Alaska's accessorizing and grooming tendencies).

Anyway, I think all the words look really big, as though I mean what I say and wish to be aggressive about putting it forward.

All I wanted was a bloody cedille. Not a revolution. Of course the fact that the links list is now so obstreperous makes me feel as though I have to address the fact that some don't even link to the main page but some 'August 2005' recap of something or other that was well and duly settled by March of that year if not before.

I want this blog to be pleasing to the eye much as my home is, but with my home I bring in or take away stuff, or move a stuff to place it didn't use to be and in which its presence will be more felicitous than previously. I am not, in other words, reduced to 'formatting' in the case of stuffs and house. In the case of this accursed blog, in marked contrast, I do not have the option of simply moving a jardinière or flower arrangement closer to the screen and a bit to the left or right; I have to do all sorts of soul-destroying things to the code of the copy of the image of the photo of the vase (or something equally geneological and even less-well understood), cross my fingers, cross myself, feveredly pound a glass of a dangerous Barolo, and stare at the screen in abject and unholy fear while holding my breath and pressing 'enter,' 'save,' or another similarly ridiculous copulatory or soteriological command, none of which verbs I particularly wish to engage in with a computer.

I feel in matters technological not unlike Noël Coward's beleaguered Colonel Montmorency felt with regard to his Home Guard troops' lack of necessary materiel. Except there is no superior to whom I might even vainly address my petitions. There's just me, and some really huge type. And the song is admittedly a lot better when sung, and most particularly when it's Coward himself doing the singing. But if I can't even format a blog to conform to my wishes, I most assuredly cannot conjure Mr. Coward sitting at my piano and killing me softly with his stirrup-pump.


'...Poor Colonel Montmorency tried, at infinite cost to time and pride
To tackle his superiors again;
Having just one motorbike, fourteen swords and a marlin spike,
He wrote the following letter in the following urgent strain:

Could you please oblige us with a Bren gun?
We need it very badly, I'm afraid.
Our local crossword solver has an excellent revolver,
But during a short attack on the fort, the trigger got mislaid.

In course of operations planned for Friday afternoon
Our orders are to storm the Hippodrome,
So if you can't oblige us with a Bren gun
The Home Guard might as well go home.

Could you please oblige us with a Bren gun?
The lack of one is wounding to our pride.
Last night we found the cutest, little German parachutist:
He looked at our kit, and giggled a bit, and laughed until he cried.

We'll have to hide that armoured car when marching through Berlin;
We'd almost be ashamed of it in Rome.
So if you can't oblige us with a Bren gun,
The Home Guard might as well go home.'

La Plus Haute Tour

I went on a good date tonight.

And shut up you for thinking what you just thought: if I hold out no hope I am in no danger of being misled or misconstrued. My approach is neutral; therefore my reading should rightly be presumed accurate. In fewer words, it was a good date, and I should be trusted on this. I had rather seal my lips, than, to my peril,/ Speak that which is not.

But yes it is true in the end: I am as shocked as you to discover that people other than me should be simultaneously nice, thinky, and as engaged as they are engaging. And I think I was mostly fine, too, which is something. Except for the beginning, when I had to call and ask was that him the guy I just squinted at and walked away from or was he not here yet which would be preferable as if he was that guy and it looked like he might be because they looked the same it might be better if we tried this another time because I could leave now and not walk up to the guy who just looked at me weirdly and then again at the end when I didn't know what to do and so barged ahead the better to get the ending ended and opened the door on my own which I hate doing and anyway am no good at either because physics gets in the way but didn't see much of an alternative at that point.

But the middle bit was fine. I hate pickles but I ate about sixteen, and there were no real knives so that was challenging because I do think they are an integral part of the eating part of a meal, but apart from that I'm sure it was fine. Well, there was the part where my hair hit the limit of its (purported) 'style' and I discovered far too late that it was not merely listing leftwards as I had only recently come to suspect but was instead fixed entirely on the left rear of my head, undoubtedly with all the end bits exploding in an unprepossessing fountain-like structure above my left ear, but I'm used to that since my lack of cosmetological expertise lends itself daily to hairstyle tragedies. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I do take it in stride and always assume my companion(s) understand it is a failure not of conception but merely of execution and, my being bereft of an engineering degree, such things are likely to happen and should be excused without prejudice.

Anyway, it was far from hell. By-and-by is easily said, but we both avowed something or other with appropriate levels of genuicity and advienne que pourra. I don't mean to sound as though I'm thinking anything other than What (overdressed) couch is the neighbor's cat hiding under, and why isn't he in the armoire where he belongs, but, as Fats Waller said, One never knows, do one?